


Watchers

by Philipa_Moss



Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carré
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 05:59:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2802098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philipa_Moss/pseuds/Philipa_Moss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nineteen Eighty-Four was a joke because they didn’t let you know they were there, like Big Brother. They were just there. Bill knew they were watching. He’d known since he was a boy at school.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Watchers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [invisible_cities](https://archiveofourown.org/users/invisible_cities/gifts).



> I've never trigger-warned before, but this one may warrant it. Warnings for past (unsuccessful) suicide attempt and past institutionalization. Also general doubt and ambiguity.
> 
> Some of the details of Roach's life at Thursgood's post-novel were inspired by this great, great, great interview with John Le Carré: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1250/the-art-of-fiction-no-149-john-le-carr especially the paragraph beginning, "Jim Prideaux was a schoolmaster..."

Big Brother was nowhere to be seen. That was Bill Roach’s first thought when day dawned on the first of January. He laughed at the thought, and his head stated pounding. He pulled his pillow over his eyes and pressed the cool side into his face. 1984 was already a joke, and the year was only a few hours old.

 

His head ached. Gin had never agreed with him. He should know better than to trust Reggie and Maia.

 

Reggie started playing “Karma Chameleon” next door. Small comfort: he’d moved on from “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” although Bill wasn’t convinced that this was any better. He pulled the pillow from his face and pounded on the wall.

 

Within seconds Reggie appeared in his doorway. “Morning,” he said. He was still wearing the shirt and tight trousers from the night before, and he had fresh eyeliner on. Reggie looked like the type to listen to the Sex Pistols, not songs Bill’s hypothetical sister would listen to. If Bill had a sister. If Bill had anyone but Reggie.

 

“What was in the drinks?” Bill asked. He was momentarily shocked at how his voice came out. It came out rough. He sounded a little like his father, and that thought made his stomach go into a free fall. He cleared his throat. “Aren’t you cold?”

 

Reggie shrugged, even though he was barefoot, and the landlord had been up more than once about the heat, or lack thereof. The man’d said he couldn’t get the parts in until the new year, which Bill suspected was bollocks. He was much too shy to say as much, though, and Reggie didn’t care enough either way to complain.

 

Bill tried another tack. “What do you do, when you’re hung over?”

 

Reggie came in and sat on Bill’s bed. He folded his feet under himself. “Big breakfast,” he said. “I’m buying. I sold the last of the shit after you buggered off home.”

 

If Bill’s parents could see him now, Bill thought, before revising the thought. If Bill’s parents could see Bill’s _life_ now. Perhaps Bill’s friends would be enough to shock (Reggie, the part-time artist and drug dealer; Reggie’s girlfriend Maia, the social worker; their numerous friends who came in and out with steaming vegetarian dishes). Perhaps his living situation would do the trick (Camden). Perhaps just his job (file clerk).

 

Or, worse and far more likely, maybe there would be no shock. Maybe they had written him off as a failure years ago.

 

“I _said_ ,” Reggie was saying, “Maia says there’s no hot water, so you may as well just change. We’ll go to one of your places.”

 

Reggie meant that they would go somewhere posh. Bill had long since stopped protesting. “Fine,” he said. He flung back the covers, and discovered that he, too, was still wearing his clothes from the night before. “Let’s go.”

 

***

 

1984 was a joke, just like _Nineteen Eighty-Four_. _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ was a joke because they didn’t let you know they were there, like Big Brother. They were just there. Bill knew they were watching. He’d known since he was a boy at school.

 

“Come _on_ ,” Maia said. She tore her bacon in half with her hands. “You can’t expect me to believe that they’d just install a former spy in your school and leave him there. What, James Bond fancied some light teaching?” She put on an exaggerated Sean Connery. “Pass me the red pen, Moneypenny, and your bra.”

 

“It wasn’t like that,” Bill said, already regretting bringing it up.

 

“Of course it wasn’t like that,” said Reggie, eyeing Bill carefully. “Because it didn’t actually happen, right, Bill? He’s having you on, love.”

 

Reggie was offering Bill an out. Bill could see that. Reggie was so careful lately, ever since Bill had let slip about the Thursgood’s balcony thing. Reggie was a kind person, under all that affect. Bill could see that, too. And Reggie was probably right to change the subject, sure, but...

 

“It did happen,” said Bill. “He showed up out of the blue one day and took the French classes. People were watching him. I was a lookout.” He didn’t say watcher. He knew better than to let Maia have that. “It wasn’t until later that I figured out he must have been in hiding or something like that. I tried to get a forwarding address, but it was phony. It led to a field in Reading.”

 

Bill had gone, one Oxford spring. He’d borrowed the car of a girl in his entryway and set out just after dawn, although the journey was short and the girl didn’t need the car back with any urgency. He’d stopped twice by the road to be sick. His nerves sang as he neared his destination, only to buzz to a deafening silence when he saw the field at the end of a residential street. No building had ever stood there, a passing grandmother assured him. Bill went back to Oxford and got drunker than he had ever been in his life.

 

“Incredible,” said Maia. “You must have loved school. Imagine running spy games in a big old place like that.”

 

Bill didn’t correct her. Instead he said, “They weren’t games. Once before he disappeared, and when he came back it was as if he were a different person. He didn’t have me keep an eye out anymore. Something obviously happened between him and the ones who were watching.”

 

“What then?” Reggie asked. “He just dropped you?”

 

There was something in Reggie’s tone Bill didn’t like. Some carefulness that was grounded in a false assumption, but he couldn’t quite pinpoint what that assumption was. “No,” said Bill. “He got better eventually. Then a year before I went to Oxford he left.”

 

“Where to?” Maia asked. “Cairo? The Riviera? Ow!”

 

Reggie looked contrite and his foot, returning from kicking Maia, connected briefly with Bill’s under the table.

 

“Nowhere,” said Bill. “Somewhere. I don’t know. He didn’t say anything.”

 

There was silence around the table. Reggie stabbed an egg, which quivered at the end of his fork.

 

“What was his name?” asked Maia.

 

“Rhino,” Bill blurted. Then before Maia could laugh, he continued, “That’s what we called him. Mr. Prideaux.”

 

Bill could remember looking at his mail, seeing that his first name was Jim, and the shiver that went down his spine. Already, this figure was closer to Bill than Bill’s parents, who had first names, but who only used them to scream at each other. Bill started thinking of Jim as Jim, and then for weeks lived in fear that he would accidentally let slip, much in the same way that Spikely once let slip and called Matron, “Mum.”

 

“What would you say if you met him again tomorrow?” Maia asked.

 

That was the question Bill wouldn’t let himself consider, because one day Jim had been there and the next day he had been gone, and there was a very real possibility that if impossible dreams were granted and Bill saw Jim again, he might very well burst into sharp, accusatory tears. Worse had happened with his parents, in the years when he came to care less about them than he did now about the memory of Jim.

 

“Let him be,” said Reggie softly.

 

Bill saw Jim everywhere—not Jim as he would be now, but Jim as he was then, coaxing Bill off the balcony railing, voice low and steady, the same voice he’d used to gentle Marjoribanks’ horse when it’d almost run off with Sudeley.

 

Bill saw Jim elbowing his way onto crowded buses. Bill saw Jim hunching through the rain. He saw Jim queuing at M&S. Every time, Jim resolved himself into another—a taller man, a younger man, a woman—and Bill would start breathing again.

 

It had been years since Bill had spoken to anyone from Thursgood’s. On bad days, it was easy to believe that he’d imagined the whole thing.

 

“I don’t know,” Bill told Maia.

 

***

 

Reggie had a split lip and a blackening eye. He was swearing and spitting blood into the kitchen sink when Bill returned from work.

 

“Fucking kids,” said Reggie as Bill fetched the bag of peas. “I’ve been selling here since before they were born. Thanks.”

 

This last was to Bill, who retrieved the peas and held the bag to Reggie’s eye. Reggie took hold of Bill’s hand and made him press firmly.

 

Bill knew the kids Reggie meant. They hung around the estate at the end of the road. Sometimes he saw them nursing lagers at The Pavilion when Reggie and Maia managed to coax him along.

 

Bill’s colleagues couldn’t believe where he lived. “That’s a trifle _bohemian_ for you, isn’t it?” was what Miss Martin, the secretary, said. “I mean, look at you. A fish out of water.”

 

Bill wore a suit and tie to work. Most of the other file clerks just wore jackets, but a suit was armor. The act of putting it on every day marked Bill as the sort of person who _could_ put on a suit everyday and ride the Tube to the city center and work a job that suffered no fools or fuckups. There had been months—years—when Bill couldn’t imagine a life or a job like this. As tedious as it could be, it was what he did with his days.

 

Miss Martin didn’t know about what Reggie did for a living. If she did, she would have been even more surprised that Bill’s life in Camden was as harmonious as it was. Then again, two weeks after Reggie had his face kicked in, Bill was returning from work and they got him as he came out of the Tube. They surrounded him and hustled him around the corner and slammed him up against the skip.

 

“Would you look at that,” their leader said. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen. His face with peppered with pimples. “Our Reggie’s boytoy.”

 

Bill knew that it wasn’t worth contradicting people when they got that thought in their heads. It only made them believe it more. Besides, Reggie and Maia were constantly telling Bill that it was perfectly all right to be bent. “Okay to be gay,” was how Maia put it. He wasn’t sure why they kept bringing it up, but it was nice to know where they stood.

 

The pimply youth was now leaning against Bill’s windpipe. “You tell Reg,” he began, when there was a commotion behind him.

 

Bill was released and sank to the ground, gasping his way into an asthma attack. There was yelling, and a hard slap. Finally, several feet ran away, and one pair of feet came closer. The feet were clad in trainers, but the voice was plummy. “I say, are you all right?”

 

Bill looked up, still trying to get his breathing under control.

 

The man standing there was stocky, and approximately ten years older than Bill. He wasn’t breathing at all hard for someone who had just chased off a gang of hooligans.

 

He crouched down in front of Bill. “I’ll be on my way, then,” he said. He sounded anxious to be gone. Remarkably, he felt for Bill’s pulse. “You’re all right.” He stood, and hurried off around the corner.

 

Telling Reggie about it later, Bill kept coming back to the man’s shoes. There wasn’t anything wrong with them, but there were cheaper trainers on the planet, and he’d been dressed like he didn’t have much.

 

The voice was the same as the trainers. It didn’t fit.

 

***

 

Now, instead of Jim, Bill saw the man with the shoes. The man with the shoes was buying cigarettes when Bill was buying paracetamol. The man with the shoes was walking just ahead of Bill down the hall at work. The man with the shoes was asleep on a park bench. The man with the shoes was protesting Thatcher.

 

Bill saw him everywhere, and then he actually saw him. There he was, one compartment away from Bill on the Tube, pretending to read. Then again, weeks later, ducking out of the newsagents opposite and stopping to converse with a tall, slender woman in a fawn coat. She also looked familiar.

 

It was then that Bill realized they weren’t just watching. They were watching _him_.

 

Reggie didn’t believe him. “You need to relax, man. You’re seeing angels. Smoke up. Get laid, maybe.”

 

But that wasn’t the answer. The one time Bill had tried Reggie’s stuff, he’d stayed glued to their somber grey sofa, paralyzed with abject terror until Maia sat next to him and let him hold the corner of her sari. “It’s a commentary on femininity,” she told him. He didn’t remember anything else from that night.

 

“Maybe Jim sent them,” said Bill. “And they’re looking after me.”

 

Reggie shifted uneasily. “Wish they’d look after me,” he said. He glanced over at Bill. His black eye had long since faded, they yellow outlines of it visible only to those who knew where to look. He had started wearing eyeliner again. “You know,” he said, “I’ve been doing well for myself lately. I could float us on the rent a month or two if you needed a break.”

 

“A break?” said Bill.

 

“Yeah,” said Reggie. “Like the sort you said you took before?”

 

Back when Bill’s parents played more than a bit part in his life, they bankrolled a brief hospitalization. This came not as a result of the balcony incident as many would suppose. That they wrote off as youthful dramatics. No, the mental sojourn in the summer following Bill’s first dismal year at Oxford.

 

What Bill remembered most vividly from those months was the day his parents accidentally timed their visits to coincide, and had to be ejected from the building to argue in the drive. Their voices were disturbing the others. That, more than anything, convinced Bill to play the game and get well and stop staring off into space and losing entire afternoons. He couldn’t inflict another Roach family visit on the residents.

 

“No,” said Bill. “There’s no call for that. You’re right. I’m just tired.”

 

Reggie looked skeptical, but he left it there, with only a quick squeeze of Bill’s shoulder. “If you need me,” he said, “I’m here.”

 

***

 

The girl at The Pavilion had been making eyes at Bill all night. Reggie and Maia were laughing about it, good-naturedly, and so they were stunned into silence when Bill got up and joined her at the bar.

 

“Hullo,” she said. She had a pleasant, low voice, like a cello. The elbows of her sweater were wearing thin, and she had a man’s watch on.

 

“Hi,” said Bill. “I’m Bill Roach.”

 

“Emilia,” said the girl. She was only a little older than Bill, if appearances were anything to go by. She had most of her hair dyed pink. The rest of it was cut haphazardly, as if she’d just taken scissors to it one day. That more than anything was what had made Bill want to talk to her.

 

Accordingly, “I like your hair,” said Bill.

 

Emilia laughed. When she was done laughing, there were tears at the corners of her eyes. She laid a hand on Bill’s arm. “Now that’s a brand of direct I haven’t heard before,” she said. If he had to place her accent, he’d say Wales.

 

“Did you do it yourself?” Bill asked.

 

“Yes,” she said. She smiled, and Bill could tell she was proud of her work. “I did these too,” she said, and rolled up the sleeves of her sweater.

 

Her arms were covered in brambles: fine-line tattoos in blue ink. A patch near her wrist was pink and raised. Without thinking, Bill put his fingers to it. It was warm to the touch.

 

“Sorry,” he said. “ Sorry.” He pulled his fingers away.

 

“No,” she said. “It’s new.”

 

“How did you start?” Bill asked.

 

Emilia tilted her head to one side and considered Bill. Then she said, as if testing him, “It seemed a more socially acceptable way to go crazy.”

 

Bill didn’t have to ask her what she meant. He ordered them both drinks, and they talked for hours.

 

Emilia was the sort of person that used to scare Bill. When he was in the hospital, he would avoid the ones like her. They were so smart, and they played at normal so well, and when they cracked and flipped they were the most dangerous, the most frightening, the saddest.

 

They always turned it inward. Bill knew how that felt.

 

Reggie and Maia were long gone—probably back to the apartment, happy to have the place to themselves for once. They were welcome to it. Bill couldn’t stop talking with Emilia. He didn’t want the evening to end. He dreaded what would happen once the pub closed and they went their separate ways.

 

He had to ask, while he still had time, “Do you ever feel you’re being watched?”

 

Emilia thought before she answered. She did that a lot. It made Bill’s chest tighten, the way it hadn’t really since Jim told him he was a good watcher. He knew Emilia was listening to what he was really saying.

 

Finally, she said, “D’you mean like guardian angels?”

 

Bill shook his head. He had considered this, after what Reggie said, and quickly dismissed it. Bill wasn’t sure he believed in anything, really, but even if there were a higher power, he doubted it was the sort to send human-shaped emissaries to earth. In what conception of the cosmos would Bill Roach warrant a bodyguard? To what end?

 

“Watched for some reason,” said Bill. “Any reason. Because someone thinks you’re important enough to watch.”

 

“And it’s not paranoia?” Emilia asked matter-of-factly.

 

“No,” said Bill, sure of this at least.

 

“And they’re not malevolent?” Emilia asked.

 

“No,” said Bill. “They protected me once when I was beaten up.”

 

Emilie sipped her drink. “Then my advice would be to enjoy it. Don’t look at it too closely. These things have a tendency to disappear.”

 

Bill nodded, because he didn’t trust himself to speak. Emilia believed him.

 

***

 

For the first time, that night, Bill dreamed of the balcony. He knew it was a dream with the inexplicable awareness that sometimes comes with dreams. And it was barely a dream, anyway. It was a memory, hiding in a dream.

 

Bill was smaller. He sat on the railing. He let a slipper fall. It fell for a long time before it slapped, anticlimactically, on the stone below. There was a gasp from the boys assembled on the stairs. Bill sat back and took in the view.

 

There came a soft voice behind him. “Well, then,” said the voice, approaching, and Bill slid forward with a jolt, counterbalancing with his whitening fingers, his weight out over the void. “I’ll jump,” he said.

 

“It’s all right,” said the voice, which Bill now recognized as Jim’s. “I won’t come any closer, Jumbo.”

 

Bill believed him. He rocked back. Someone on the stairwell expelled a sigh of relief.

 

“What’s all this then?” Jim asked, casually, as if discussing the weather.

 

How to explain? Jim had had a lifetime of ducks and drakes before he’d had time to become truly unhappy. And he had gotten over it. Bill would never get over it.

 

“It’s no good, sir,” said Bill. “I’ve tried. I can’t do this. I can’t stay here.”

 

“So don’t,” said Jim. “Kick up a fuss. Your parents—”

 

“They don’t care whether I live or die,” said Bill, and froze. He’d long believed the truth of it, but had never given the thought life before. He made himself speak again, because he had nothing left. “I wrote to them that I want to leave. They didn’t even read it. Neither of them.”

 

“Listen, Jumbo,” said Jim, and now he was speaking firmly, his French grammar voice. “Plenty of boys have families who don’t deserve them.”

 

“It’s not just that,” said Bill. “I’m useless. I can’t do the routine. It’s been years that I’ve gotten better and then gotten worse. Oxford won’t want me. Cambridge won’t want me. I don’t belong anywhere. I can’t do anything.”

 

There was silence behind him. Then came Jim’s voice, much closer than before. “May I sit? Your friends have dragged me out of bed very early. They’ve interrupted my beauty sleep, such as it is, and my back—”

 

“They’re not my friends,” said Bill, but he said nothing else, and eventually Jim came jerkily into view beside him, sitting on the railing, facing Bill, his feet planted firmly on the ground.

 

“I can’t force you to do anything you don’t want to do,” said Jim. “If I haul you off this railing, you’ll only find another way, am I right?”

 

This thought hadn’t occurred to Bill. He wasn’t sure that it _was_ right. But he nodded.

 

“I have been very unhappy in my time,” said Jim. “But you knew that. Noticed. Best watcher in the unit.”

 

It had been years since he’d heard it. Bill let out an involuntary sob.

 

Jim made a noise of frustration. “I’m no good at this, Jumbo,” he said. “I don’t know what makes life livable. If I knew that, I wouldn’t have needed your help.”

 

Bill stared down at where his slipper had fallen. It was a long way down.

 

“Give me a chance,” said Jim. “You’ll see that this would have been a mistake.”

 

So without really realizing that he’d made the decision, Bill let Jim pull him backwards off the balcony, wrap him in a blanket, and carry him lurchingly down to Matron.


End file.
